Freitag, 16. Oktober 2009

Growing Our Own Food III - Crazy Harvest




After two years of random planting and yielding a large crop however, this summer and autumn our garden provides some surprising new experiences. I shall learn more about unpredictable circumstances, preferences of little animals, cryptic processes of nature and first of all, my own greenness.


These carrots look quite different to those you get in a supermarket, don´t they? If you watch them closely you can notice a lot of grooves and swellings caused by every single hard step they take to permeate the soil. We are lucky to lift only a few like the short one in the middle this year. It takes some time until the compact soil gets more crumbly.


I love beetroots, especially beetroot salad in winter. Maybe that´s why I couldn´t wait to seed them as early as possible. Now we´ve got quite a number of them at the beginning of august instead of autumn as expected.


Tomatoes actually have been playing a joke on me. Growing like crazy last summer, I decided to plant only two bushes this year. At the end there were eight growing in the vegetable patch like by an invisible hand. Since our compost heap originated insufficient heat, this spring unsuspectingly with the garden mold we brought onto the patch a lot of tomatoe seeds still as fresh as daisies. At lower temperatures I cut the fruits still unripe together with the stems and hang them on nails in front of the south-facing hayrick wall where they get red or yellow mostly within a week.


Chili peppers are drying in the sun. Unfortunately we mixed up sweet and chili pepper seeds. Now we enjoy the sweet ones like a rare delicacy and will be able to cook hot dishes for ages. Anyway, I love them!


We really have been looking forward to pick these delicious grapes in September and decided to purchase a grape press. The juice tasted good, somewhat sour as we tried hard to beat the wasps and birds to the draw which devoured the fruits for the most part.

I am an accurate person and know my own mind. I´m sure that natural gardening is a good exercise program to learn to let things rip.

3 Kommentare:

  1. Your garden is beautiful and the harvest look good too. I love my garden too.

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  2. Wow your garden is beautiful! Looks tasty too!

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  3. It´s a real paradise indeed, and a lot of work too:)

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